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Born in 1863 to an Irish immigrant farmer, Henry Ford quit his parents’ estate as a young man, and became an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company where, prone to experimentation, he became intrigued by the automobile. In 1905, he founded the Ford Motor Company which, by an innovative manufacturing process christened “Fordism,” made cars accessible to ordinary Americans. Ford, amongst others, was to blame for the indulgent consumerism that overtook the U.S. in the teens and twenties; such was America’s fascination with and dependence on the car that “[m]any families . . . [didn’t] spend anything on recreation except for the car.”[1] Only after the New York Stock Exchange crashed in late October 1929 did Ford’s star wane, as Americans disposed of their misguided regard for such technological wonders as the car, the vacuum cleaner, and the electric sewing machine. By the 1940s, that which Ford represented and stood for––the so-called “business consensus” of the Roaring Twenties, American prosperity, economic inequality, anti-labor, anti-welfare, anti-immigration, white supremacy, and isolationism––was less prevalent in the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era populist reforms and the U.S.’s precipitous entry into World War II convinced America of the need to settle its domestic affairs and assume a more prominent international role as the West’s guiding light; Henry Ford’s America, as morally dubious as it was, was unprepared to discharge such momentous responsibilities. Read the rest of this entry →